Booker's Just Dropped an Innovative New Bourbon—and We Got a First Taste

Beam Distilling just announced a new innovation from its esteemed Booker's label: Booker's Bourbon The Reserves.

It's the very first edition of a soon-to-be annual release made by eighth generation master distiller Freddie Noe to commemorate his grandfather and the label's namesake Booker Noe.

"Liquid like this can take awhile to find, but when I do, it feels like the big man himself picked them out," Freddie said in a press release. "It's just the kind of bourbon I believe my granddaddy would be making if he were still alive with us now."

Although the release is an ode to Booker, this whiskey has Freddie's fingerprints all over it. While experimenting with different liquids and barrels in the Fred B. Noe Distillery on the James B. Beam campus in Clermont, KY, one word kept coming to Freddie's mind: scraps. With so many barrels sitting around, he decided to meld the best flavor possible with what already existed.

Freddie hand-picked eight lots of barrels from across the distillery of the following ages and warehouses:

• Eight years, two months, 12 days on the fourth floor of warehouse G
• Eight tears, five months, 19 days on the fifth floor of warehouse I
• Eight years, five months, 20 days on the fifth floor of warehouse Z
• Nine years, two months, three days on the fifth floor of warehouse Q
• Nine Years, two months, four days on the sixth floor of warehouse J
• Nine Years, five months, 18 days on the seventh floor of warehouse H
• 10 Years, three months, two days on the fourth floor of warehouse X
• 14 Years, four months, 16 days on the sixth floor of warehouse I

I got a first taste of the bourbon while sitting across from Freddie in the Noe Distillery tasting room. The whiskey had notes of dried fruit and brown sugar on the nose. When I sipped, classic yet complex notes of vanilla and charred oak spread across my palate. Once swallowed, a long, lingering finish left notes of baking spice on my tongue.

Although it's a hot whiskey—125.9 proof—it was well-rounded and smooth. Freddie credits that lack of burn to picking barrels from the middle three floors of each warehouse, the "sweet spot" as his grandfather Booker would say.

The final bourbon blend, Freddie told me, is more like a baked potato than a steak. When you cook a steak on the grill, he says, you get a different texture outside versus inside. But when you bake a potato, you get a consistent texture all the way through.

"These barrels had a very nice, even, uniform aging process to develop that unique flavor," he told me.

Booker's Bourbon The Reserves is bottled at 62.95 percent ABV and will be available across the U.S. at $130 MSRP for a 750mL bottle in a commemorative wooden box.

It's not the only innovative bourbon Freddie released this year. He also created the first edition of Little Book The Infinite , a new annual release that started as four whiskeys blended together: one aged by his grandfather Booker, one by his father Fred, one by Freddie himself, and one that all three had a hand in. For each subsequent year, Freddie will fold in a new whiskey, slightly changing the flavor profile as the years go on.

Related: Best Bourbons for an Old Fashioned, Tasted and Reviewed